Call it a life-and-death segue. One minute Jamie Foxx was being
mentored by a sprightly Ray Charles through the singer's
decades-long repertoire. The next, the actor seemed to be
memorialising the man behind the wraparound sunnies in his
career-defining performance in Ray.

The film wasn't finished when Charles died in June at 73 from
liver failure. That could be a nightmare scenario for a
contemporary biography or be great for box-office topicality. That
seems to have been the case with Ray.

But like its subject, the movie had a colourful pedigree.
Director Taylor Hackford tried for 15 years to get it made with
Charles's co-operation. The old musician was canny enough to ask
for input on casting, which is why Charles was putting Foxx through
his paces in his Los Angeles studio less than a year before his
death.

"I've played real people before, like in Ali [in which
Foxx played the boxer's corner-man, "Bundini" Brown], but never the
main character," he says. "There were lots of challenging things
about this, including - obviously - getting into the mindset of a
blind man.

"Everything was going real well until we got to Thelonius Monk,
because jazz isn't my strongest style of music. I hit a wrong note
and he stops and says, 'Now, why the hell would you do that? The
notes are right there in your fingers. You got to take a second and
find them.' Because he was blind, sound was everything for him -
which became my sort of mantra for finding him, too."

Foxx nailed Charles, but it's not a canonisation. The film
doesn't shy away from Charles's extracurricular affairs: neither
the long, enduring one he had with heroin, nor the short, rocky,
extramarital ones he had on the road.

Judging from the critical and commercial reaction, Foxx's
balance was pitch-perfect.

The 37-year-old won a Golden Globe for Ray and is tipped
to win an Oscar next month.

The path to Academy glory is pretty treacherous for new talent
that hits the front early, but Foxx's odds are helped by Ray
being his second superb turn of the past six months, following his
revelatory performance opposite Tom Cruise in
Collateral.

"It's pretty heady stuff," he says. "I played football when I
was in college, so I'm always in it to win it. But there's no way
to explain how you feel when somebody talks about an Oscar and
you're a kid from Texas who never thought any of that would be
possible."

Foxx happily admits he's something of a party animal. In a
recent cover story on him, Entertainment Weekly reported a
bash he threw on a yacht in Sydney Harbour last year while he was
shooting his next film, the thriller Stealth.

Stealth director Rob Cohen was quoted saying: "It was
Jamie, me, five other guys and 50 of the most beautiful girls in
Sydney, including Miss Australia. At about 5am, Jamie was going
'round the room pouring champagne into everyone's mouth."

Foxx says: "I had a ball in Sydney. And yes, I did hang with
Miss Australia. The thing is, Stealth was hard, but my part
wasn't as big as this, or in Collateral, for that matter, so
I had more down time."

In Ray he had much more to do, and he got it: Charles's
long gait; his wide, open-mouthed smile; his stretched, goofy
stance taking a bow; and his southern-infused speech. But the
biggest plus in Foxx's performance is that he manages the
kaleidoscope of emotions of Charles's life without the most useful
tool in an actor's bag: his eyes. A lot of the time he had his eyes
glued down.

"That was the hardest, man," Foxx says. "Sometimes I was
freaking. They left me on the set at lunch sometimes because they
forgot I had prosthetics on my eyes. It was like being shut in a
coffin. But it was so necessary because Ray Charles never got to
cheat.

"If Ray Charles was doing a gig, he didn't know if there were
3000 people out there or 30,000 until they started cheering. He had
to take somebody's word for it. Sure, his other senses were highly
developed and he could verify, but not right off."

Foxx decided not to spend much time with Charles after his day
with him in the studio. He doesn't regret the decision because he
was trying to channel the Charles of 40 years ago.

"He was an older man and his health, obviously, wasn't primo
when I was working on the character," Foxx says.

"And I was playing him when he was a lot younger so I didn't
want to get too caught up in where he was now. It was my hunch. So
I spoke to his children and to his friends like Quincy Jones. And
people lent me a lot of tapes and cassettes, some of them pretty
rare, so I could study how he moved and played piano at the
time.

"I used that as the DNA to get the young Ray as we moved through
the film. It was just taking him, studying him and then crushing it
down to where it's not the impersonation, but the nuances, how he
talked to his kids, how he talked to his wife."